news

China Has the World’s First AI News Anchor A TV anchor has joined a Chinese news agency, but with a twist: he isn’t human. China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) anchor, a move it claims to be a world first. “English AI Anchor” debuted Thursday Read more…

Apple Is Talking To Big Newspapers About Joining Its Subscription Service Last March, Apple bought Texture, a digital magazine service. Now it wants the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal to join up. Earlier this year, Apple got into the magazine business by buying a Read more…

Jon Stewart is Making an Animated Show About Cable News HBO offered some details on the show Jon Stewart is developing for them at their Television Critics Association press tour session Saturday, Variety reports. The show will be “an animated parody of a cable news network with an Onion-like Read more…

News Sites Are Tracking Your Web Traffic Way More Than Porn Sites Online news sites track users across the web with more third-party tracking code than any other type of site, a new study has found. Using a custom open-source measurement tool, Princeton researchers analyzed the top 1 million websites Read more…

In the past decade, there’s been a steady breakdown of democracy in America. Between Donald Trump’s demagoguery, ongoing government-sanctioned mass surveillance, and an electoral process dictated by media and money, even the concept of democracy is dangerously open to interpretation. Data, that lauded harbinger of mathematical accuracy and scientific truth, Read more…

It’s turning out to be a bad week for Facebook. As we reported earlier, it was learned that Facebook’s news feed routinely suppressed conservative news. Now, Recode is reporting that Facebook training documents given to its editors have leaked, and they reveal that editors select trending news topics from just Read more…

The so-called dark web, for all its notoriety as a haven for criminals and drug dealers, is slowly starting to look more and more like a more privacy-preserving mirror of the web as a whole. Now it’s gained one more upstanding member: the non-profit news organization ProPublica. On Wednesday, ProPublica Read more…